Computing technology has transformed the way we work and play. Businesses, residences, and other enterprises have come to rely on computing systems to manage their key operational data. Often, the data itself is many times more valuable to an enterprise than the computing hardware that stores the data. Accordingly, in this information age, many enterprises have taken precautions to protect their data.
One way of protecting data is to introduce storage redundancy. For example, a primary computing system maintains and operates upon the active data. Meanwhile, a backup computing system maintains a copy of the data as the active data existed at a previous instant in time. The backup copy of the data is periodically updated. More frequent updates tend to increase the freshness of the data at the backup computing system. At some point, the data at the primary computing system may become inaccessible or otherwise lost. When needed, the data is then transferred back from the backup computing system to the primary computing system.
For faster recovery, some backup systems perform volume-based backup in which all of the sectors of a particular volume are backed up. Such sectors may include application data, but may also include application programs, operating system(s), and associated configuration information. This protects against more severe failures in which more than just data is lost, but perhaps the entire volume has become corrupted. In that case, the previously backed-up volume is transferred from the backup computing system to the primary computing system. Reinstallation and reconfiguration of the operating system and application program is not needed since the installed and configured executable representations of the operating system and application programs are already present in the backed-up volume.
This traditional volume-based backup works well so long as the primary computing system is still available to restore its running state to. Unfortunately, some failure events may result in not just lost data or state from a particular volume, but may also result in a loss of the hardware itself. In that case, unless there is an identical redundant primary computing system with the same hardware (which itself can be quite expensive), restoration of the backup volume is postponed until identical hardware is acquired. This can take substantial time. The problem is compounded when multiple computing systems have been lost in the failure event.
When recovering data access after such a failure, time is money. Depending on the enterprise size and operation, each minute without operational data may mean thousands, or even millions, of dollars in lost revenue. Therefore, what would be advantageous are mechanisms for efficiently restoring access to data and other operational state of multiple primary computing systems, even if the primary computing systems are no longer available, and without necessarily requiring replacement computing systems that have identical hardware as the lost primary computing systems.